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It's time for Indiana to start listening a little more to Jesse Kharbanda. Actually, a lot more.

Head of the Hoosier Environmental Council, the rational and measured nonprofit environmental organization, Kharbanda spent most of the past four months playing a legislative brand of defense over at the Statehouse, where he was one of the more important voices fighting against all sorts of awful anti-environmental initiatives in a state already chock full of them.

And while Indiana needs to listen a lot more to Kharbanda, the good news is that many legislators at least heard him out during the recently concluded session. The better news is that some of the most egregious pieces of legislation offered this year died under the weight of their own ridiculousness. Still, that's a long way from having a state legislature that worries anywhere near as much about the environment as it does about factory farms and other polluters.

"We knew it would be an extremely difficult session," Kharbanda told me recently as he sat in his basement office in a building near 38th and Meridian streets. "But in the end, legislators generally acted wisely when it came to the environment."

Was he surprised?

"Very much so."

That's understandable. After all, one of the legislature's biggest time-wasters this year was a bill to protect factory farms from those who might document abuses taking place on their properties. Another sought to put into the state constitution a right to hunt, fish and farm, which sounds great but isn’t necessary and would provide outsized protections to meat-producing factory farms. It could essentially strip from local and state governments the ability to regulate, say, chicken farms and hog ranches. Other bills sought to prevent the state from addressing its unique environmental issues.

While the worst pieces of legislation died, some will undoubtedly be recycled next year. And as environmentalists fought against bad bills, lawmakers spent no time on efforts to make Indiana cleaner. That, despite the state’s tradition of being ranked among the worst in the nation when it comes to air and water pollution. Nonetheless, Kharbanda offers an optimistic take on the situation.

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“Hoosiers care a lot about their state,” he said. “And if we are careful in how we communicate we ought to be able to get Hoosiers to rally around the things we care about: clean air and fresh water, the ability to enjoy a nature trail, and the idea that whatever your walk of life you should have an equal right to environmental quality in your community.”

This isn’t radical thinking; it just bumps up against routine procedure in Indiana, or at least at the Statehouse. There is a deep concern about jobs and too often environmental concerns are inaccurately portrayed as economically problematic. Voters, meanwhile, seem largely content with a system in which business interests drive state policy. With that reality, Kharbanda skillfully ties his environmental positions on issues such as mass transit and clean water to their economic benefits. He avoids sharp rhetoric, a nod to the political reality of the state he operates in.

His job, he said in a follow-up email, “is to deepen existing relationships and build new ones, all with the belief that the power of understanding different worldviews and engaging in the plane of reason and facts can, despite all of the understandable skepticism and cynicism out there, prevail.”

The organization’s challenge was perhaps best underscored by its push at the Statehouse to address the problem of phosphorus contamination in many Indiana lakes. The group sought a modest law that would have required retailers who sell lawn fertilizer to post small notices telling consumers that most lawns don’t need additional phosphorous and that the runoff from it harms water quality. The goal was to promote cleaner water, and to protect birds and fish, in a state that benefits greatly from lake-related tourism.

“It’s a symbol of the kind of issue that we stand for,” Kharbanda said. “It emphatically improves the economy and it emphatically improves the environment.”

Business groups killed the measure without much effort, arguing it would have been too big of a burden on stores. That was disappointing. But it’s all a process, Kharbanda insists.

“Good things happen,” he said. “But the question is, do good things happen at the pace and scale that they should?”

In Indiana, they do not. Thankfully, though, groups such as the Hoosier Environmental Council are working to change that. And while Indiana policymakers should listen more to people like Kharbanda, the fact that they’re listening at all is a testament to the quality of his organization.